Month: January 2014

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – Winston Churchill

Every organization needs a clearly articulated mission, a vision of where it wants to go, and a plan of how it will achieve that vision. That strategic plan is the roadmap for the future – and to be effective, its implementation should be monitored continuously until goals are met.

The reality is that we live in a world of short attention spans. All too often, we make plans, set them in motion and then walk away. Job done. And only much later do we look at the results – often to our dismay.

SLEEP seems like a perfectly fine waste of time. Why would our bodies evolve to spend close to one-third of our lives completely out of it, when we could instead be doing something useful or exciting? Something that would, as an added bonus, be less likely to get us killed back when we were sleeping on the savanna?

“Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild,” Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, told me. “It has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.”

NEW ORLEANS & ROCHESTER, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MiniVax, Inc. (New Orleans, LA) and the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY) announce that they have entered into an exclusive option agreement with agreed licensing terms to develop a monoclonal antibody for the treatment of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP). The antibody of interest is a product of research conducted at the University of Rochester. PCP is a life-threatening, fungal respiratory infection that affects patients with weakened immune systems such as those suffering from HIV/AIDS, receiving organ transplants, and undergoing chemotherapy.

Companies interested in entering should have a scalable business concept with high growth potential. Companies must be early-stage, as defined at the time of application by having less than $250,000 of outside cash investment and less than $500,000 in cumulative revenue (excluding research grants).

The first place winner receives a $25,000 cash prize plus marketing and business incubation services. Second and third-place winners receive smaller amounts of cash and services. The runners-up receive marketing and business services.